When scientists talk about the cryosphere, they mean the places on Earth where water is in its solid form, frozen into ice or snow. Read more ...

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On Monday, 11 July from 3:00 p.m. through Wednesday, 13 July until 5:00 p.m. (USA Mountain Time), NSIDC data distribution, services, and Web site will be unavailable to accommodate a major upgrade to our data center. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.
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The global reprocessed sea ice concentration data set from the EUMETSAT Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF) spans 1978 through 2009 and was generated with brightness temperature data from the Nimbus-7 Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) and the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) -F8, -F11, -F13, -F14, and -F15 Special Sensor Microwave/Imagers (SSM/Is). Sea ice concentrations were computed from atmospherically corrected SMMR and SSM/I brightness temperatures using a combination of state-of-the-art algorithms and dynamic tie-points. Gridded files are available every other day for the SMMR record from 1978 through 1987, and every day for the SSM/I record from 1987 through 2009. As this product contains data quality and error information and is unique from other sea ice products archived at NSIDC, such as those generated using the NASA Team and Bootstrap algorithms, it is especially useful for cross-validation studies.